Old topics are reintroduced in this blog, without the taint of cliché, since they are, well, topical. Canonicity is one of these topics.

Times being the way they are, we are asked from time to time- and with near 100% frequency by new clients- what items will be worth if resale should be necessary. We used to get this question a lot when we first opened- July 2002 it was- not exactly hot on the heels of the bursting of the dot.com bubble, but still close enough for discomfort. Chappell & McCullar missed out on the glory years of selling English antiques to the dot.commers, who, apparently, had huge amounts of money from the sales of shares in their ephemeral businesses.

The subsequent generation of big spenders, those in the last five years, have spent money on contemporary art, and, witness its recent performance in the salesrooms, prices have dropped like a rock- along with mid-century modern furniture. But, interestingly, Old Masters have held their own, and 2008 saw some records set for English antiques.

This, of course, is how the existence of a canon in the fine and decorative arts manifests itself. When others fade from popularity, objects that have consistently maintained their appeal declare themselves, no longer occluded by the fleetingly popular.

The fading interest in contemporary material has coincided with the fading fortunes of those who made it popular- and are now trying to dump what they paid a high price for. It’s funny- with the return in popularity of traditional investments (read ‘those where you can actually determine how the money is made’), traditional decorative material is what we find is now the receiving the most interest.

A couple of weeks ago, a Wall Street Journal article discussed the old Keynesian notion of ‘animal spirits’ as a significant element associated with the current recession. One would assume, expressing for a moment a nickel’s worth of economic theory filtered through a penny’s worth of zoology, humans as animals have responded to the economic downturn in the same irrationally contagious manner as cattle do when moved to stampede over a cliff.

Maybe, but interestingly, in our galleries we haven’t lately found any real expressions of panic. Yes, we ourselves have found one or two good buying opportunities in English antiques, but nothing that speaks of gotta sell. Mind you, we’ve never experienced any episodes of panic buying, either- even in the best of times, our clients’ vascular content seems to be composed less of hot blood than it is of ice water.

The animal spirit we’ve seen I’d more accurately liken to a deer caught in the headlights of a car, a phenomenon encapsulated in the phrase my partner Keith McCullar would prefer I stop using, ‘seized up’. I like it, though, and perhaps this is ego, because it removes the animal spirit and replaces it with the predictable rationality of the pistons of  a car engine stopping within the block because the motor has no lubrication.

Within this particular trope, confidence seems to be the human metaphor for lubrication, because, times being the way they are, we are finding plenty of people interested in our material, but very few confidently proceeding to the point of the sale. We aren’t even seeing any ‘bottom feeders’- people who make inordinately low offers on material, in the hope that we might sell out of desperation. Certainly, there is plenty of news about how dire conditions are, if not in the art market as a whole, then at least in the auction market. According to the New York Times, Sotheby’s and Christie’s both are reducing staff by over 10%. While both houses have realized a significant drop in revenue, this has more to do with decreased consignments than it does any drop in prices for fine and decorative arts. Consignors are unwilling to sell, of course, in a market where they are not confident of getting top dollar.

With a lack of confidence on the part of both buyers and sellers, the market has, well, seized up. The question is begged, naturally, what will turn conditions around? My car engine metaphor at this point breaks down, pardon the pun- maybe it doesn’t, if the mechanism of government intervention functions in the same manner as an engine rebuild, to unfreeze capital and restore confidence. Massive government intervention is as Keynesian as the notion of animal spirits. At this point, I invite my 20 or so devoted readers to pick their own metaphor, with the economic stimulus package either causing the crankshaft to turn, or the collective animal spirit to return to contented grazing. Simplistic, but, I admit, intellectually I have more in common with the painter Duncan Grant, Keynes’s great and good friend, than I do with John Maynard Keynes.

With international markets on their knees since early last October, it is a relief to find that life in the trade carries on. At least at some level, admittedly a less robust one- practiced understatement- than we’d enjoyed heretofore.

For the month of January, we wrote about as many invoices as we ever do, albeit for significantly smaller amounts than a typical January. As well, we’ve had a fair number of shoppers, both private clients and interior designers. These contacts are slowly- here I would insert the adverb ‘excruciatingly’ emphasized with a pronunciation performed between gritting teeth- developing, because, not surprising, people, while wishing to purchase, also wish to hold on to their cash. A case in point, we’ve been holding a set of 12 dining chairs in our back room for over a year- all paid for, pending completion of the client’s new home. It is complete, as of three weeks ago, but the client is reluctant to select fabrics and finalize selection of a dining table. I guess it’s TV trays for now (do they even still make them-?)or some such, as I know first hand that the client’s new dining room is cavernously empty.

Moreover, we’ve had the most overwhelming response ever to our last week’s new acquisitions email blast. Has it resulted in sales? Frankly, not too much, but what it has yielded are more inquiries than we’ve ever had, but nearly all of them hedged with ‘We’re not quite ready to decide, but would you mind giving me a price?’ This is unusual in our experience. When people start to talk money, a sale is likely in the offing, certainly with our private clients. For interior designers, our experience has always been that, unless they are shopping for clients (read ‘getting paid for it’) they don’t shop at all. I have to characterize all of this as the ‘it doesn’t cost anything to look’ phenomenon- believe it or not, an unusual circumstance in our business.

The high level of interest in our material, judged by gallery and virtual gallery (read ‘website’) traffic is matched by our friends in the trade who’ve completed shows over the last few weeks. The Los Angeles Art Show, the Winter Antiques Show, and the Palm Beach shows have all had huge numbers of people through them, but no forthright dealers can boast of any significant sales. My partner Keith McCullar talked himself hoarse at the Los Angeles Art Show, with a reported 30,000 people in attendance.

Show browsing as cheap entertainment? Yes, but so is going to the movies. Let’s wait for the follow on and hope that the large numbers of visitors will engender significant pent up demand for art and antiques. And, English antiques in particular.

The fortunes of Mallett’s, the venerable soon-to-be-former Bond Street firm, may not necessarily be a bellwether for the trade, but, as a public company, and so far as I know the only remaining publically held antiques dealer, its to-ing and fro-ing, financially and otherwise, are generally the stuff of media fodder, including my humble blog.

The move off Bond Street, arguably the most expensive shopping street in the world, is probably a matter in which Mallett’s has little choice, and, given the primo location opposite Sotheby’s and dead center between Oxford Street to the north and Piccadilly to the south, their leasehold has got to be about as desirable as any space on the planet. One wonders whether their space in New York on Madison Avenue won’t soon have another tenant.

No question, cheaper premises can always be found. With that, though, our own best promotion is our gallery space, located in an established antiques venue. Given, with an exorbitant increase in rents, Bond Street, as nearby Mount Street, is with each passing day less an art and antiques venue than it is a shopping parade for haute couture. Tragic that arts and antiques venues are being priced out. As our business is still high touch, so gallery premises in an established venue remain of paramount importance for the continuation of the trade. While the proper maintenance of a website is critical, it is only an adjunct to premises commensurate with the type of material on offer. With all that, in spite of the changing age demographic of the retail antiques buyer- which is, I might add the same demographic and often the same buyer for both contemporary and period material- the practice of, for want of a better term, ‘antique-ing’, by which I mean taking sufficient time to browse, making one’s way casually from gallery to gallery, is still the preferred method of shopping that is always, and I mean always precedent to making a purchase.

Apparently, Mallett’s is also looking to cut costs by reducing its participation at antiques fairs. Certainly, fairs participation is expensive and exhausting. The plain cost of the stand, plus kitting it out with décor, plus transporting one’s goods to and back from, and housing and feeding staff while at the fair. Keith McCullar and I generally work the fairs we participate in, and, trust me, it is hard to continue to stand upright at the conclusion of even a three-day fair. But, we’ve found that, next to premises, fair participation functions as an outstation of one’s gallery, and, in our strong markets, if we didn’t do fairs, we would have to go to the trouble of mounting our own trunk show. Does a show always result in good sales? Frankly, the answer is no. Not all fairs result in good at-show sales. However, we find that, at the end of the year, the more fairs we’ve done, the better our overall performance for the year will be. That said, we’ve found that fair participation is a poor method for market development. In fact, fairs we’ve dropped include some of the best attended fairs we’ve ever been involved in- but they were in locations where we had little penetration to begin with, and, consequently, fair attendance didn’t help us.

Of course, a number of arts and antiques dealers of Mallett’s stature participate in the world’s most exclusive- and expensive- fairs, and have been mainstays for decades. One wonders, moreover, how much continued participation is driven by actual commercial success, and how  much by ego- something on the order of feeling a need to be seen. Times being the way they are, none of us can now afford this particular conceit.

It’s been said before that access to Turner Classic Movies alone is worth the monthly cost of cable television. Frankly, I don’t know how many of my other cable channels even work, so infrequently are they accessed. If TCM didn’t work, I’d know it. My partner Keith McCullar is not such a fan, with his not so clever rejoinder ‘I don’t want to watch an old movie’ sounding even before we’ve settled on the sofa. He is, of course, a philistine, and, as the primary possessor of taste, I generally don’t pay too much attention to him.

Away as he was for a couple of days, I watched without molestation a near surfeit of TCM, including, rapture, back to back showings of A Star is Born (1937 version) and All About Eve. Both winners of lots of awards, I don’t really need to reprise much in terms of cast or story-line for either film. Or do I? For those of you that find that I do, you have doubtless stumbled on to the wrong website. Shades of Addison DeWitt; as with Bette Davis, George Sanders never looked lovelier.

Having watched both movies so often, I now give myself the pleasure of watching for other things- background action, for instance, like the crowds reaction to Norman Maine getting beaten up by Libby in the bar at Santa Anita racecourse, or bits of business like Max Fabian belching from the bicarb he’s just been given by Margo Channing.

What I also spend time looking at is set decoration. Not surprising, given my avocation, but what continues to surprise is how effective decoration is in establishing a mise-en-scène, the background, then, making the action as believable, believe me, as the dialog and its delivery. Mr. Selznick and Mr. Zanuck, your money was well spent.

What’s more, the decoration can function to either make the movie a period piece, inadvertently, or render it timeless. I don’t know who David O Selznick employed with such aplomb to accomplish both the exquisite streamlined interiors of Oliver Niles’ office as well as the wonderful Hollywood Regency interior of Norman Maine’s beach house, but the effect, over 70 years on, hardly seems dated. As well, the interior of Margo Channing’s New York townhouse, from the outsized, quilted chintz in her bedroom headboard, to the boldly carved commode beneath the Toulouse-Lautrec poster in her drawing room, still evoke the quintessence of sophistication. What else could they have drunk there but martinis? George Davis won an Oscar for creating this cocktail-drinking haven where one could picture oneself looking forward with joy to what Bette Davis promised would be a bumpy night.